updated 07:40 am EST, Mon January 30, 2012

Analyst reckons strong Kindle Fire shipments in Q4

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan was willing to risk a late prediction of Amazon's results with a research note late Sunday. He estimated that Amazon shipped six million Kindle Fire tablets in the fall. The online reseller was succeeding as it had "staked out" both the low end of the market and a loyal base that would likely spend a large amount on e-books and videos.

Although Apple CEO Tim Cook hasn't seen the Kindle Fire as a threat, Rohan saw it in the same space as the iPad. It fulfilled some of the reasons why people had previously only bought computers. "Tablets including iPad and Kindle Fire are rapidly taking share from PCs and notebooks," he said.

He went on to raise the outlook for Amazon's yearly revenue to $67.2 billion, up by more than $2.3 billion, on the assumption that the attach rates, or amount of content sold by device, would be higher than most think. "There is a great deal more to the Kindle device strategy than most have discounted," Rohan explained.

Amazon may not necessarily validate the details with its official results on Tuesday. The company has developed a reputation for being secretive about its Kindle device numbers and, even when it revealed that it sold a million Kindle devices a week in December, refused to break out shipments by the model. Kindle Fires were known to be the most popular models and are still widely thought to have become the most popular Android tablets by a wide margin, even though their sales are still well short of the iPad.

Analyst logic...

So, by analyst logic, the iPad was a dismal failure last quarter because Apple should have sold 21 million iPads instead of the 15 million they did sell if not for the Fire eating the iPad's lunch. Apple is doomed once again.